Sriracha chilli beer coming to blow you away

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November 28, 2014: The brewer that brought you beard beer looks set to shock us all again with a new chilli-flavoured brew. Next month US brewer Rogue Ales will launch a sriracha beer that's bound to challenge even the most robust palates. Chilli beer is not new but it's the prospect of this particular Vietnamese hot sauce spicing up the stout that has Eater and others excited. But if the idea of a chilli pepper, garlic and distilled vinegar sauce-infused beer isn't strange enough for you, click on through for more of the world's weirdest beer flavours.

Blue beer

If you're bored of swilling golden, sun-kissed beers, why not try what's billed as "the bluest beer in the world"? Abashiri Blue Beer is "bluer than blueberries, bluer than the Smurfs, bluer than the Blue Man Group, even bluer than Daniel Craig's glistening blue eyes," according to internet retailer Firebox. (In case you didn't already twig: this beer is blue.) Its hue comes from its blend of blue seaweed, Japanese flowers and melted iceberg water.

Image: Firebox

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Beard beer

Brace yourself: this one is super-gross. Rogue Brewery in Oregon prepares a beer made from wild yeast harvested from the 30-year-old beard of its award-winning brewmaster John Maier. It sounds vomit-inducing, but the company insists it's not as horrible as it sounds. "You're not really drinking a beard, you're drinking a great beer that happens to have a yeast that comes from a beard," Rogue's president Brett Joyce told KPTV News.

'Oyster' beer

Hopefully you're still braced from beard beer, because this one is grosser: Rocky Mountain oyster beer. No, it's not made from oysters (though oyster beer is a thing). It's made from "freshly sliced and roasted" bulls' testicles — aka "Rocky Mountain oysters". Colorado's Wynkoop Brewing Company started "the ballsiest beer ever" as an April Fools' Day joke, then turned it into an actual product said to sport "deep flavours of chocolate, espresso and nuts". Pun intended?

Image: Wynkoop Brewing Company

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Space beer

In 2009, Japan's Sapporo Brewery made a beer using malt made from "space barley" — grains descended from seeds that had spent five months aboard the International Space Station. Only 250 Japanese customers were given the opportunity to purchase six-packs, which cost about $100 (with proceeds from the sale donated to children's education charities and space research). The spacey brew reportedly had "a mellow flavour and slightly dark colour reminiscent of deep space".

Image: Sapporo Brewery

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Meteorite beer

In 2013, quirky US brewer Dogfish Head teamed up with spacesuit-manufacturer ILC Dover to produce another space beer, this one made with an even rarer ingredient: crushed lunar meteorites. Dubbed "Celest-jewel-ale", the German-style beer is said to have "notes of doughy malt, toasted bread, subtle caramel and a light herbal bitterness".

Image: Dogfish Head

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Elephant poop beer

In 2013, Japanese brewery Sankt Gallen produced a beer named "Un, Kuno Kuno" — a pun on "unko", a Japanese word for "poo". The product was accurately named, because it was made from coffee beans that had passed through an elephant. (Yep.) According to RocketNews24, the foul-sounding brew tasted "insanely delicious". Customers certainly weren't put off: the beer, made to coincide with April Fools' Day, reportedly sold out in minutes.

Cat poop beer

Danish brewery Mikkeller has a similar drop, only instead of coffee beans that have passed through an elephant, it uses coffee beans that have passed through a civet — an Asian mammal that's kind of a cross between a cat and a weasel. Founder Mikkel Borg Bjergsø boasts that Beer Geek Brunch has a strong "roasted, chocolate-y flavour". He adds that he only "employs" civets from Vietnam and not from Indonesia, where there have been reports of cruelty to the animals.

Image: Mikkeller

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Hello Kitty beer

Hello Kitty is one of the most recognisable and popular children's icons in the world (she's also not a cat, despite what you may have heard). So it's slightly surprising that officially licensed Hello Kitty beers are sold in Taiwan and China. The beers were introduced in six fruity flavours "so ridiculously smooth and tasty that one can barely tell they're drinking beer", reported Kotaku — whose reviewer also noted the beverage's surprising potency.

Pizza beer

Pizza and beer go so perfectly together. Of course someone combined them into one drink. Mamma Mia Pizza Beer was invented in 2006 by Illinois home brewers Tom and Athena Seefurth. It's made by putting an entire margherita pizza — complete with tomato, oregano, basil and garlic — into the mash used in the beer-making process, then steeping it like a teabag. While it sounds... odd, Mr Seefurth told CNBC the beer is so popular that it saved his house from foreclosure.

Banana bread beer

Creative boozers have brewed beer using bananas. But even more creative boozers have taken banana beer the next level by brewing banana bread beer. UK brewing company Wells and Young's says its banana bread beer is one of its most popular varieties, with "tempting banoffee aromas tempered by a grassy, lemony nose all leading to a finely balanced, fresh, delicate flavour of peppery hops with a lingering dry finish".

Image: Wells and Young's

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Marijuana beer

It is really so surprising someone brewed a marijuana beer? Cannabia, touted as the world's first beer of its kind, was introduced in 1996 when Germany authorised the cultivation of hemp. (In case you're wondering: while Cannabia's hemp percentage is probably too low to do anything but get you drunk, drinking cannabis-infused brews can make you high.)

Image: Cannabia

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Taxidermy beer

This one's less about the beer and more about what the beer is bottled in: the taxidermied corpses of small animals. In 2010, UK brewery Brewdog created a high-alcohol line of beers called The End of History, bottled inside a stuffed stoat or grey squirrel. (No need to worry about animal cruelty — the animals were all roadkill.) Brewdog boasts that the sold-out bottles "are at once beautiful and disturbing — they disrupt conventions and break taboos, just like the beer they hold within them".